Spring or not spring?

Just like this year's spring, we are late (again) with the blog. We keep getting glimpses of real, proper spring-like weather - tantalising windows in which we think "this is it", with blue skies and heavenly warm sunshine - but just as we are starting to let our guard down the weather switches back to the grey, wet stuff and we find ourselves holed up indoors again. Admittedly it's no longer properly cold, but with grey skies and torrential rain (and hail and thunder) we still need to be lighting the fire in the house to feel comfortable - and our winter woodpile is in a very sorry state indeed!

In the days of better weather we have managed to push on a bit further with the tractor park, with the tractor itself now under cover and just the final third of the structure to finish - all done with materials from our own land. We've also done a lot more felling of trees, clearing and tidying of the terraces immediately beneath the car park. These sections of terrace are now collectively known as "mushroom land", as this is the area designated for the logs (which have now been cut) into which will be inserted plugs containing mushroom spores and, with any luck, will end up producing our first harvest of mushrooms.

Our English evenings at the local village club continue to be entertaining and have also started bearing fruit in a different, unexpected way. We have forged really good friendships with at least a couple of the people who come to the evenings, and from these we ended up with 21 bargain price olive trees delivered to our door and an invitation for Easter lunch.

The olive trees came from our new friend Luca, who works at the agricultural college in Pescia. He'd invited us to pay him a visit at work, so one day last week we headed over and he showed us around his greenhouses. We ended up buying 21 olive trees at €3 each - a bargain price (the school were looking to get rid of them) - as well some border shrubs, and some of the school's wine. Of course, 21 olive trees (at about 5ft tall) don't fit into a Fiat Panda, so Luca offered to come and deliver them in the school's van the next morning. Poor Luca didn't get the warm welcome he deserved from Reggie (who simply barked and barked at him), but we were delighted to see him and just about managed to converse over the noise of Reggie's barking.

The Easter invitation came from our new friends Roberto and his wife Vicky - the last English evening we held was the first time Roberto had brought Vicky along (or managed to convince her to come) and, having asked in the course of conversation what they would be doing for Easter, they suddenly decided to invite us for Easter lunch! We had a lovely time with them - the conversation flowed in a mixture of Italian and English, we ate so much food that we could barely move, we met all 5 of their cats, and we all learned a bit more about each other's lives. It is humbling to feel so welcomed into people's lives like this.

Otherwise, highlights of the fortnight were a lovely lunch at the nearby Toti restaurant with the full compliment of our valley friends: Donatella, Paul & Kathy and David & Sarah on Good Friday; a visit to our neighbours to congratulate them on their recent marriage (which they'd kept secret and we only found out about because our friend Luca, who works with Rosanna, told us), and a visit to the Fiera di Santa Maria in Selva - a fete in Borgo Buggiano traditionally held on the first weekend of spring every year and which sells all sorts of plants.

We are promised a dry weekend this week, even with temperatures reaching and exceeding 20C, but more rain again next week. Perfect conditions for the grass to grow, the weeds to appear and a load more jobs to materialise!

21 olive trees.

Working on the tractor park.

Trunk with bark.

Trunk without bark.

Tractor park from below.

Chestnut posts ready for cutting.

Ready for transporting down the drive.

Ready for bark stripping.

Bark stripping.

Stripping bark.

Tractor park.

We paid a brief visit to a fete - the Fiera di Santa Maria in Selva - at Borgo a Buggiano. The fete (which concentrates on selling plants) is traditionally held on the first weekend of spring - and it usually rains...

... this year the sun was out, but the wind was bitterly cold!

We eyed up the unusual breeds of chicken, wondering if they would stand any better chance against Mr Fox!

Lots of colourful plants for sale.

Cutting trees for mushroom land.

The view from the top of mushroom land.

Mushroom land.

Tidying in mushroom land.

Mushroom logs cut and stacked.

From this...

...to this. In just 12 hours.

In between downpours at the weekend we managed to level out the ground, put some fabric down and start to fill the area with gravel. 

And we planted a new hydrangea.

That's more like it - Easter Monday was bright and sunny.

Easter Monday's workplace - this beats sitting in an office all day.

Vicky had made painted eggs at Easter - using leaves (for the pattern), onion skins and a pair of stockings. Beautiful!

(This blog post covers the week 19 March 2018. - 2 April 2018)

More of the wet stuff

There's really vanishingly little to report about the last week - in a word, it was wet, which meant we spent a lot of time indoors. The continuing rain caused another landslide at the end of the weekend, this time on the road that leads from Pietrabuona up to the village of Medicina, meaning that the road was closed for 12 hours while the security services worked to clear it and make it safe to pass (or safer) and the residents of the small row of houses beneath the road were evacuated overnight.

We occupied ourselves over the wet weekend by cleaning the house and by cooking a meal for our friends Paul & Kathy, with whom we spent a lovely evening on Saturday night, and on Sunday we took a drive out (in the rain) to explore some more of our area, this time reaching the small medieval town of San Miniato in the province of Pisa, about 40km south of Pescia. We were impressed with San Miniato's interesting architecture, pretty views and historic buildings and will definitely return - when the weather is nicer (and/or in November when the town hosts its annual truffle festival). As it was, we hurried around the small town in the cold rain and biting wind, snapped a few photographs and then dashed back to the warmth of the car - having only really left the house with the intention of going for a coffee in Pescia, we hadn't thought of gloves or scarves or proper winter coats!

So, a very short update this week, and just a handful of atmospheric photos:

Meanwhile, from the other side of the valley (photo taken by Mara).

This one likes to stay warm and dry.

And our flying visit to San Miniato:

The seminario vescovile (bishop's seminary).

The cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta and Jenesien.

The museum of sacred art.

The tower of Federico II (which was destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt in 1958).

(This blog post covers the dates 12-18 March 2018.)

Brutal/dramatic nature

The overriding theme of the last week has been the brutality and drama of nature: dramatically wet weather, a huge landslide and some macabre finds in the woods.

To start, though, here are some pictures from the couple of windows of sunny weather that we were treated to during the week, brief as they were.

On Friday afternoon it was 17C and sunny.

It was hard to believe that a weekend of wall to wall rain was coming.

The garlic doesn't seems to mind the copious amounts of rain we've been having recently.

There was sunshine after the rain in Vellano.

Wild crocuses line the drive.

So, let's get onto the macabre. To start with, on Tuesday night we had fun and games with Reggie – something outside on the terraces had clearly upset him and despite it pouring with rain and it being past midnight (way past his usual bedtime), he was intent on running around the garden barking incessantly and absolutely did not want to come in. We had two failed attempts at getting him to bed – we went through his usual bedtime routine, put him in his room, and by the time we got upstairs he had started whining and barking from his bedroom – and in the end resorted to leaving him to sleep in the living room on the sofa. He settled quite quickly after that, which is more than could be said for either of us. With Reggie loose in the living room we had to shut Florence into our bedroom with us (she likes to roam the house at night time and we didn’t want her accidentally wandering into Reggie’s jaws, so she was on lockdown with us), meaning that we were subjected to being jumped on, sat on and slept on all night, and to top it all off the rain turned into a tremendous storm, with thunder, lightning and the loudest rain (and hail) you can imagine. Not a good night’s sleep!!

The following morning, we began to build a picture of what had been upsetting Reggie the previous night: when Stuart set off to take him for a walk, he ran straight off to the terraces immediately below the car park and returned with a dead fox in his mouth! Thankfully, he deposited it on the patio outside the front door and then went off for his walk, allowing me (once I'd got over the initial shock of looking outside the door to see a lifeless fox lying prostrate on the patio) to bag it up for disposal. It was all a bit of a mystery to us – either it had died of natural causes or it had been killed by something (we could only imagine a wolf ) that wasn't interested in eating it. Either way, We guessed that Reggie had heard/smelled/seen/sensed the presence of the fox (and its possible killer) the previous night, and that explained his extreme agitation.

Reggie's first find of the week.

The next morning, on setting out for his daily walk, Reggie once again headed straight off to the terraces below the house, this time to the edge of the orto, just beneath the poly tunnel, and came back bearing a deer leg which had been stripped to the bone bar the very bottom part and hoof. This really did seem like the work (and leftovers) of wolves, so we assumed that the fox may have been some form of collateral damage - perhaps it had got in the way of the wolves or dared to attempt to share some of their kill.

Over the next few days Reggie continued to make gruesome finds on his daily walks, and the tally currently stands at: 1x dead fox, 1x deer leg, 1x entire fox tail, 1x partial fox tail and 1x deer head. All within the last 7 days.

We are well aware of the fact that wolves are present in our valley, and we have found some evidence of deer kills on our land on two previous occasions, so it doesn't come as a complete surprise. What perhaps was a little more unexpected was the proximity to the house of Reggie's finds. Of course it's entirely possible that the pieces he found had been dispersed from a kill site elsewhere, moved by scavengers (indeed the latest find - the deer head - came from the woods further along the drive), but we will now be on the lookout for other tracks and traces and see what we find.

So, onto the dramatic side of nature: the weather. Save for the brief windows of sunshine shown in the photos at the start of this post, it was pretty much wet all week long, and roughly halfway through the week we became aware of the fact that the weather anticipated for Sat/Sun was so bad that a red weather alert had been issued for our area. In fact, by the time the weekend arrived the alert had been downgraded to "just" orange (weather alerts increase in severity from green, to yellow, to orange, to red), but we still expected some heavy downpours and a frustratingly unproductive weekend.

In the clouds.

Bored of being stuck indoors.

In the event, the rain was less Armageddon-like than we had been expecting – we've certainly had much harder rain in the past – but it was very much sustained, with no let-up, and clearly the volume of water that has fallen in recent weeks has had a cumulative and devastating effect: we were somewhat shocked when we stepped outside the front door on Sunday afternoon (to take Reggie out for a wet walk) to look up and see part of the hillside opposite us missing...

That wasn't there before.

What looks like a very muddy, very steep ski slope is, in fact, a landslide – which, thankfully, is on a slightly different aspect of the hillside from the house of our friends Mara & Franco (while the landslide is very close to their house – directly above and behind it – there is a gully/ravine in between their part of hill and the affected part).

When the cloud lifted we could see just how close the landslide is to the house that's positioned up on that part of the hill.

Thankfully, the house perched up on the hill up there is a little way back from the edge, but clearly part of the land in front of the house is in a perilous state, and we can't imagine how the inhabitants of the house must have felt when it happened - and how they continue to feel, especially with yet more rain forecast.

So, thanks to the rain we spent the weekend feeling utterly stir crazy, but we were (and are) thankful that stir crazy was the most extreme feeling we had to face.

Each time Reggie goes out into the garden to bark at things, Florence makes the most of the brief window of dog-free safety to come and sit by the fire. 

Reggie would like another crisp, please.

(This blog post covers the week 5-11 March 2018.)